READY TO PARTY: MUMIA ABU-JAMAL AND THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

Part One:

"DO SOMETHING, NIGGER!"

By Todd Steven Burroughs

Wes Cook was (and is) an explorer and an adventurer. He
thrives on intellectual challenge and feeds on the adrenalin rush of the
quest. In the 1970s, being a radio journalist, he fulfilled these needs as
Mumia Abu-Jamal; but that identity was far ahead of Wesley Cookas he
turned 15. He was neither a radio journalist nor an international cause
celebre nor yet a man, although friends and family said he often carried
himself like one. Cook was a teenager in search of his manhood and identity
during a time when his people openly sought their destiny.

"I remember—and of course we’re talking about decades ago
now—but I remember it was probably one of the most exciting and liberational
times of my life," Mumia Abu-Jamal recalled to an interviewer in the
appendix of "Death Blossoms," his second book. "Of course, for most people,
their teen years are a time of freedom. Mine were a time of ultra, super
freedom. It was a tremendous learning experience."

Enter the Black Panther Party. It was 1969 when Cook
helped form Philadelphia’s BPP branch. It was a time to be young, angry and
Black. Like many Black teens of the time, Cook wanted outlets—for
camaraderie, for expression, for resistance, for nia (meaning
"purpose" in Kiswahili). There were many choices for young Blacks who were
also looking for those things. They included the Nation of Islam, the NAACP,
and various Black cultural nationalist organizations in colleges and/or on
the streets. For Cook, the Black Panther Party’s Philadelphia branch
satisfied those four needs.

"As a fourteen-year-old, I joined the Black Panther Party
and became part of a revolutionary formation dedicated to defending the
Black community," Abu-Jamal recalled years later in an anthology on Black
men edited by Essence magazine. "I felt like a man. I joined the
Party about a year after another man, Bobby Hutton, was murdered by Oakland
cops, and[,] like Bobby, I was fully prepared to give my life in defense of
the Party and our people’s righteous struggle for freedom and
self-determination. Man, then, meant militant defense, service, and
sacrifice for one’s people, one’s community and one’s Party."

Bonding happened quickly between Cook and his fellow
Panthers, most of whom were at least five years older than him. Cook’s
"father hunger," as he would label it later, was particularly satiated by
his relationship with Reginald Schell, the branch’s captain. The recent
death of "Mr. Bill," Cook’s father, had, like the Movement, moved adulthood
a little closer. Acting more like a big brother at home to try to fill the
absence of "Mr. Bill," Cook would happily embrace the role of Schell’s
little brother while they worked for the people. Their friendship and
working relationship would be birthed by, and would survive, the Party.

(Like Cook, Schell—whose official title in the Philly BPP
was Defense Captain, the highest rank in a branch—was a working-class Black
man who wanted to be more involved in the Movement. He left a foreman job at
a sheet metal company in order to be part of the BPP’s Philadelphia branch.
He recalled in Philadelphia Weekly, an alternative newspaper, how his
wife initially thought he lost his mind when he told her his plans to be
part of a Panther chapter. "I told her, ‘I can’t take this s**t no more.’
Blacks getting killed in the South because they were trying to vote, dogs
getting sicced on them. My mind couldn’t just compute that.")

In "Death Blossoms," Abu-Jamal, always aware of his
status as a "political prisoner," publicly remembered his relationship with
his Panther brethren the way a revolutionary would:

"Without a father, I sought and found father figures like
Black Panther Captain Reggie Schell, Party Defense Minister Huey P. Newton,
and indeed, the Party itself, which, in a period of utter void, taught me,
fed me, and made me part of a vast and militant family of revolutionaries.
Many good men and women became my teachers, my mentors, and my examples of a
revolutionary ideal—Zayid Malik Shakur, murdered by police when Assata [Shakur]
was wounded and taken, and Geronimo ji jaga (a.k.a. Pratt) who commanded the
Party’s L.A. chapter with distinction and defended it from deadly state
attacks until his imprisonment as a victim of frame-up and judicial
repression—Geronimo, torn from his family and children and separated from
them for a quarter of a century."

THE PARTY NOT only gave Wes Mumia Cook (as he now called
himself) a second family, but also a single outlet for his creativity, his
intellect and his sense of rebellion: revolutionary journalism, in the form
of his post as the branch’s Lieutenant of Information. Being a propagandist
suited him; Schell noticed Cook could put words together well, both verbally
and in print for The Black Panther national newspaper.

His Black Panther bylines varied with his
nicknames: Wes Mumia, West Mumia, Mumia X and Bro. Mumia. His articles read
like those of a recent convert ("Throughout our history, some niggers have
refused to bow down and be beaten into the dust"), reflecting the defiant
anger—and, some Panthers and others would say years later, the political
immaturity—of the time. His articles, like most in the Party newspaper,
would end with some sort of proletarian call to action: "Do Something,
Nigger, [Even] If You Only Spit!"

Cook had found a career that he would use to define
himself as his life took many turns. School just couldn’t compete with the
intellectual immersion that journalism required and the excitement it and
the other Party work generated. It wouldn’t be the last time Cook would
bounce back and forth between formal education and its more gregarious,
dynamic, lower-class, creative, free-spirited and attention-seeking cousin.

With his path set, Cook became a fulltime revolutionary.
He dropped out of Benjamin Franklin High School and took up residence in the
branch’s headquarters. Cook’s family trusted him to find his own way, so
they put up no resistance.

As spring became summer and summer became fall, Cook’s
days and nights in 1969 quickly became centered around three things: Party
work, his family, and a young woman named Francine Hart. She was attracted
to the tall, Afro-ed Panther with the deep voice, even though he was younger
than her. Cook gave her a new name fitting a revolutionary—Habibah. Soon he
and Biba, as she was nicknamed, seemed attached to the hip, becoming
regulars at rallies, streetcorners (selling the newspaper) and Robbens
bookstore downtown.

From a Death Row cell, Abu-Jamal has publicly ruminated
on the tenuous state of young Black manhood. Every young African-American
male still has the choice he faced decades ago: to be consumed by anger or
to constructively channel it; to embrace self-pity or seek higher ground.
"One can emerge with the poison of aloneness, or the shared sense of
commonality," he postulated in the Essence anthology.

The teenage Cook chose to be pro-active, to emerge with
the latter. He was also fortunate to have a Movement that easily absorbed
his energy. Cook had begun to meet his teenage desires—to "do something" to
nourish himself. He embraced his adventure into young manhood. As a result,
Cook gained a new family that was helping to fuel a revolutionary spirit of
Black unity. He enjoyed both while they lasted.

Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D. (tburroughs@jmail.umd.edu)
is an independent researcher/writer based in Hyattsville, Md. He is a
primary author of Civil Rights Chronicle (Legacy), a history of the
Civil Rights Movement, and a contributor to Putting The Movement Back
Into Civil Rights Teaching (Teaching For Change/Poverty & Race Research
Action Council), a K-12 teaching guide of the Civil Rights Movement. He is
writing a biography of Abu-Jamal.